Friday Round-Up: Twitter translates, Amazon wallet folds, and men are hanging out on Pinterest

Another week is at an end and it’s been a week of change here at MarketingPilgrim. Out there, in the rest of the digital marketing world, not so much. Seems like everyone is caught in the January slump. . . .or worse.

eBay gave their state of the union address and it wasn’t good. They used phrases like “going to get worse before it gets better” and capped it with layoffs for 2,400 workers. Later this year, eBay will be splitting from its sister company Paypal and though Paypal is expected to grow after the split, eBay is headed into dark waters. The hope is that someone will buy the company and return it to its former, collectible auctions, glory. I hope so because I can’t go a day without eBay.

Twitter announced a few new tweaks this week. The “while you were away” feature will push important Tweets you might have missed to the top of your timeline on mobile. This goes against Twitter’s real time philosophy and makes them more like Facebook in that they’re going to decide what’s important to you and what isn’t.

Si usted puede leer esto. . . you might be using Twitter’s new translation tool. Click the globe in the corner of any foreign language Tweet and the Bing translation pops up right below it. It’s a nice feature not just for the casual user but for social media managers who need to keep an eye on what people are saying about a company.

I tested a few Tweets and the translations are pretty good, especially when they were coming from professionals. As expected, casual Tweets with a lot of slang, didn’t always make sense.

In another part of the web, Amazonshut down the Amazon Wallet app this week after a short, 6 month beta test. The digital wallet should have caught on by now but everyone’s still struggling to make the idea work. I wonder why. . .